I didn't sleep much that night. I lay on a bed of flattened Maggi cartons and thought about Pintu bhaiya walking down the market lane among the dead with his kettle, as if he were going home from work.
Everybody else in the godown had a theory. Arjun thought he was dead too, a special kind of dead that could still make chai. Simran thought he had some kind of perfume on that the dead didn't like. Bunty, who had actually seen his eyes, said nothing at all, which for Bunty was a kind of theory.
I didn't have a theory. I had a fact, and I kept it to myself.
There was one thing about Pintu that I knew and nobody else in that godown did. For two years, under the neem tree at the corner of our lane, he'd sold chai in the front of his stall and something else out of a tin at the back. Small capsules, blue and silver, that the toppers bought in twos and threes before the big tests, for focus. He took them himself, too. He'd told me once, laughing, that he hadn't slept a whole night since his nephew's board exams.
And I knew one more thing about Pintu, which was the thing he knew about me. I lay in the dark and thought about that until the dead went to class.
· · ·
At ten o'clock, Ira taught us field signals.
"NCC," she said, standing in front of us in the aisle between two towers of Maggi with her braid redone so tight it looked painful. "Infantry hand signals. Silent communication. If we're moving and I need you to do something, I can't shout, and you can't ask. You look at my hand. Understood?"
"Understood," said Bunty, with enormous seriousness.
She held up a fist. "Halt. Freeze where you are."
Bunty raised his own fist above his head like a film hero about to give a speech.
"You don't do it back," said Ira. "You stop."
"Oh."
She lowered her flat palm towards the floor. "Get down."
Bunty lay down flat on the floor of Goyal Traders.
"Get up," said Ira.
"You didn't do the get-up signal."
"There's no get-up signal. You get up when the danger has passed."
"How does Bunty know when the danger has passed?"
"Because I'll do the next signal."
Bunty thought about this from the floor. "So Bunty just lies here until you do another signal."
"Yes."
"What if you're dead?"
There was a short silence. Simran giggled and clapped her hand over her mouth.
Ira pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at a spot on the wall. "I see something. Look there."
Bunty, still lying down, looked at the spot on the wall.
"Why would I point at the enemy?" he asked. "Won't the enemy see me pointing?"
"Bunty," said Ira, very calmly. "I will leave you here."
It took forty minutes. By the end of it, Simran had all eleven signals, Ananya had all eleven and was correcting Simran, Arjun had about eight, and Bunty had invented three of his own, including one for Bunty needs a snack, which Ira refused to recognise. I had all of them in the first ten minutes. I'm good at memorising things. I made sure to get two of them wrong in front of Ira so she wouldn't think about that.
Then I gave them my rules.
I'd written them in the Ledger the night before, and I read them out in the godown in the order I'd written them, like a question paper, and they listened the way people listen to a question paper, which is to say carefully and with a lot of fear.
"One. We only move between twelve and four. Before noon they're still waking up. After four, they start getting faster, and after seven, you've seen what happens.
"Two. In the afternoon, they stand in the shade. So we walk in the sun. Always. Middle of the road, full sun, no matter how hot. The sun is ours.
"Four. Single file. Ira in front, then Simran, Ananya, Arjun, Bunty, me at the back. Nobody talks unless it's an emergency. Ira's hand is the only language.
"Five. Water every twenty minutes, whether you're thirsty or not.
"Six. If one of them turns towards you, don't run. Stop. Stop moving, stop talking, stop breathing loudly. They go to sound and movement. If you're nothing, after a while they forget about you." I looked up. "I think."
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"You think?" said Arjun.
"I've watched them for four days. Four days is a small sample."
"Kabaadi," said Arjun, "you're the only man I know who could say small sample about zombies."
"Droppers," said Bunty.
"Droppers. Sorry."
· · ·
We left at noon.
The heat outside the shutter was like walking into the mouth of a furnace. Forty-six degrees, maybe more. The road had gone soft in places, and the air above it shook. Within a hundred metres my shirt was stuck to my back and my bag felt as though somebody had filled it with bricks while I wasn't looking.
We walked in the sun, down the middle of the road, single file, behind Ira.
And on both sides of us, in the shade, they stood and watched us go.
That's what it felt like. That's what I'd never imagined, all the times I'd watched them from the roof. From the roof you saw them from above, and they looked like people waiting. From the middle of the road, you saw them at eye level. A woman in a salwar suit under a shop awning, swaying very slightly. Two boys in hostel T-shirts in a doorway, their heads hanging. An old man on a bench under a gulmohar tree, red blossoms in his lap. A boy sitting on a scooter in the shade of a wall, his hands on the handlebars, waiting for a signal that was never going to change. Every one of them was in the shade, and every one of them was perfectly still, and every one of them was facing the road.
It was like walking down the aisle of an exam hall with every invigilator in Kota watching you.
Ira didn't look at any of them. She walked with her eyes on the road ahead and her hand at shoulder height, where we could see it. Behind me I could hear Bunty breathing through his nose, slow and deliberate, the way you breathe when you've told yourself very firmly not to panic.
Every twenty minutes, Ira raised a hand with her thumb to her mouth, which was the signal I'd made up for water. Nobody laughed at it. We drank in the sun, in the middle of the road, with the dead watching.
· · ·
The first time we had to stop was in Indra Vihar, at the corner of a lane that I'd planned for us to take.
Ira's fist went up. Everyone froze, Bunty included, which I found genuinely moving.
The lane ahead ran past a small coaching centre, one of the hundreds in Kota that rent a ground floor and two classrooms and put a banner outside promising selections. This one had a deep, shady porch with a tiled roof. In the porch, packed together shoulder to shoulder in the shade, were maybe forty dead students.
They were all facing the front door of the coaching centre. The door was shut. They were waiting for it to open, the way students wait for a classroom at the start of a batch. Some of them had notebooks.
The lane was narrow. To get past, we'd have walked within a metre of the front row.
Ira looked back at me. Her face said very clearly: your lane. Your plan. Now what?
I pointed left, at the high wall of the building beside us. Then I held up two fingers and walked them in the air, which was not a real signal, but she understood it.
The building was a boys' PG called Sai Sadan. I'd delivered there all of last winter, Maggi by the dozen and photocopied notes by the kilo. The back gate onto the service lane had a latch that you could lift from outside with a stick if you knew where to put the stick, because the boys who lived there came home after the night curfew and had worked that out a long time before I did.
I knew where to put the stick.
The latch lifted. The gate swung. We went through Sai Sadan's back yard in single file, past the washing area, where a dead boy in a vest was standing at the dry tap with a shirt in his hands, rubbing the collar against itself, over and over, the way you scrub the dirt out of a collar. He was doing his laundry. He'd probably been doing his laundry since Sunday.
None of us looked at him. All of us looked at him.
We went out by the front gate, into a different lane, past the coaching centre's porch from the other side, out of its line of sight, and back into the sun. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
When we stopped for water, Ira came and stood beside me.
"That was a good lane," she whispered.
"I know."
"The main road would have been better."
"The main road has a bus stand every two hundred metres. Shade."
"The main road is wider. You can see them from further off."
"And they can see us from further off."
"They don't see. They hear."
"We don't know that."
"You said that. Rule six."
"I said I think."
She looked at me with an expression I was beginning to recognise. It wasn't anger. It was the face of a person who'd found a flaw in a proof and wanted very badly to tell the teacher, and couldn't, because the proof had worked.
"Next time," she said, "we discuss it before we turn."
"Next time," I said, "I'll do the signal for discuss."
"There's no signal for discuss."
"Then make one up. Bunty has."
· · ·
From the edge of Indra Vihar you can see Shikhar Tower side-on. I hadn't meant to look at it. I looked.
It was half past one, the middle of the afternoon batch. The sun was full on the blue glass, and through it, on every floor, I could see the classrooms. All of them were full. Rows of dead students sitting at the desks, facing the boards. Somebody standing at the front of each room. The LED band across the top was still running on the generator, red on black, RANK IS A HABIT, RANK IS A HABIT, and on the sixth floor, near the corner, there was a window where I knew Room 603 must be.
I couldn't tell which window it was. All of them had someone standing at the front.
Arjun, in front of me, had stopped too. He was looking at the Tower with his mouth slightly open.
"Two years," he whispered. "Two years I went to class there. Every day. Seven a.m." He swallowed. "Kabaadi. Do you think they know? That they're in class?"
"No," I said.
"Good," said Arjun. And then, because he was Arjun, and Arjun dealt with everything the same way: "Better attendance than me, though."
Ananya, behind him, made a small sound. I realised after a second that it was a laugh. It was the first time I'd heard her make any sound that wasn't breathing.
· · ·
By two, we'd come out of the lanes onto the big road that runs towards Talwandi and the crossing with Jhalawar Road. There was nothing for it here; the road was the only way. Four lanes, a median full of dead bushes, abandoned cars at every angle, a burnt-out auto on its side. The dead stood in the shade of the bus shelters and the big hoardings, and under a tarpaulin somebody had strung up outside a juice shop.
At the crossing itself there was a bus shelter, a concrete one with a curved roof and an advertisement on the back for a coaching institute promising AIR ONE.
A man was sitting in the bus shelter on an upturned crate.
He was thin, in a vest and a checked lungi, and he was the only thing at the crossing that wasn't perfectly still. He was pouring chai from a dented kettle into a paper cup, in the shade, with three dead men standing behind him like bodyguards, sacks on their backs. All around the crossing, in every bit of shade, the dead stood and didn't look at him.
He looked up as we came out of the sun, and his face split into a huge red-eyed grin.
"Kabir babu!" Pintu bhaiya called across the crossing, much too loudly, raising the paper cup. "Chai?"